Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva is a business owner, educator, speaker and author — specializing in reinvention. She has been called ‘The Reinvention Guru’ in Ventures magazine and ‘The Queen of Reinvention’ from TEDx Navasink.  

As a business owner, Nadya oversees a group of companies active in real estate, investment, and consulting. As a consultant, Nadya has helped organizations such as The Coca-Cola Company, ENRC PLC, IBM, CISCO, Erste Bank, Henkel, Knauf Insulation, Vienna Insurance Group and many others to reinvent their products, processes, and leadership practices.

As an educator, Nadya personally contributed to the development of nearly 5,000 executives from over 60 countries and 20 industries through small group executive education sessions, custom-made seminars, and long-term corporate reinvention projects.

She served as the Coca-Cola Chaired Professor of Sustainable Development at IEDC- Bled School of Management, an executive education center based in the Slovene Alps, where she continues to teach courses in leadership, strategy, change management, design thinking, and sustainability. In addition to IEDC, Nadya has also taught at  IPADE Business School (Mexico).

As a speaker, Nadya has shared her insights with audiences worldwide through keynotes, panel presentations, and workshops. She has delivered three TEDx talks in Austria, Slovenia and the US.

Nadya is a member of the Resourcefulness Advisory Board at OMV, an oil and gas company, and an Advisory Board member of Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit at Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. She also serves as the President of Challenge:Future, a global student think-DO-tank and innovation competition that unites 35,000 members from 242 countries and territories.

As an author, Nadya has written two books, Embedded Sustainability: The Next Big Competitive Advantage in 2011 and Overfished Ocean Strategy: Powering Up Innovation for a Resource-Deprived World in 2014 and contributed to five others. In an effort to reinvent corporate approaches to sustainability strategy, Nadya and her co-author Chris Laszlo coined the concept ‘embedded sustainability’, which was virtually non-existent when they started in 2009. Today, it produces 55 million Google search results and has become a staple for corporate sustainability efforts.

Nadya received her bachelor’s degree in management and psychology from Hartwick College and her PhD in Organizational Behavior from Case Western Reserve University.